


What Dreams May Come

by Sandrine Shaw (Sandrine)



Category: Robin Hood (TV)
Genre: Canonical Character Death, F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-02-16
Updated: 2012-02-16
Packaged: 2017-10-31 06:59:54
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 952
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/341234
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Sandrine/pseuds/Sandrine%20Shaw
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Hood's sword and the flaming fires of hell would be kinder than this, Guy thinks. (Coda to 2x13 We Are Robin Hood.)</p>
            </blockquote>





	What Dreams May Come

"I love you," she says, and her kiss tastes of apples and copper and desert sand. There's something wrong with that, but when Guy reaches for it, it escapes him and slips from his mind. He doesn't give it second thought; it doesn't seem important enough to matter anyway. 

Her mouth steals his breath away, and Marian presses closer, until all he can feel is her body against his. He wants to possess her and protect her and melt into her and hold on to her, worship her and punish her for making him wait so long and mark her as his own, and he doesn't know where to begin and how, too many conflicting desires raging against one another.

His lips graze the side of that pale, delicate neck as he bends down to press a kiss to her shoulder, drawing a little shiver from her. 

"Marian." He breathes her name in reverence – like a prayer, a solemn, unspoken vow, and when he feels her arms around him, it's like coming home.

Her taste is still in his mouth and her scent in his nose when he wakes, sunlight streaming into his room on Nottingham castle, and there is a smile on his lips as the illusion lingers. 

It's not always the same dream. There are others which couldn't be more different: cruel nightmares and dark premonitions, ranging from Marian plunging a dagger into his heart as she draws a kiss from his lips to Hood running him through in righteous vengeance. Some of them are less easy to decipher: horrific visions of flames and stone and vast empty lands, the taste of sand and ashes on his tongue, suffocating him. They leave him waking up screaming or choking for breath, cold sweat covering his skin and a lingering, remote panic haunting him for long seconds until he realizes that he's awake and it was all but a dream. There's relief in waking, and it's almost easy to shake off the remnants of the nightmare when he recognizes it for what it is.

This one, though, this one's the worst: the one where he gets what he most desired, gets to be happy in his dreams until reality crushes in on him in the morning. Those inconceivably cruel seconds after he wakes up, when, the dream still vivid, he reaches out and expects to find Marian lying beside him only to come up with empty air and the realization that it was never real and that it never will be… Hood's sword and the flaming fires of hell would be kinder than this, he thinks.

He tries to hold on to the images from the dream a little while longer, cling to them like a drowning man clasping the driftwood. But before his mental eyes, Marian already slips from his grasp. The ivory of her skin turns ashen, and all he can see is the crimson stain on her white dress getting larger and larger, until it covers her like a sea of red.

The man who looks at him from the mirror looks haggard and as pale as Marian did when she was dying in his arms, a mere shadow of himself. When Vaisey pinches his cheek and says, "Aww, cheer up. I know you loved her and all, blah blah blah, but don't you think it's time you found yourself someone else to mope over?" Guy clenches his jaw as tightly as he can because if he opened his mouth now, he might just start to scream and never, ever stop until he has no breath left.

Sometimes, he thinks about taking the sword and burying it in Vaisey's guts, watching the man bleed to death on the cold stone floor. And wouldn't that be fitting, sweet revenge for Marian and ironic parallel at the same time, having both the people who meant most to him die in the same way, by the same weapon, at the same hand? 

It's just a daydream he indulges in, though, as unreal as the ones that visit him at night. He will not kill the Sheriff now when he didn't kill him before, if for no other reason than because it would make Marian's death even more pointless. He chose his side; a different choice, and she would still be alive, beside him when he wakes instead of haunting his dreams. Changing his mind now when it won't make a difference anymore would be a travesty. 

So he smiles a grim smile and nods and says, "Yes, Mylord," secretly hoping that Hood will leave him alive long enough to watch Vaisey die. 

He drinks himself into oblivion and keeps himself awake until he can't, until exhaustion takes over and Morpheus welcomes him back with treacherously soft arms.

Marian takes his hand and entwines their fingers. Her carefree laughter echoing in the air, she lets herself fall into the soft sand and drags him down with her. Her chestnut hair fans out like a dark halo around her face, in stark contrast to the pale sand around and the even paler skin it frames.

He kisses her until he's breathless, until his skin is flushed with heat and her body feels cool against his own. "Stay with me," he says, with his voice more urgently than he intended, because there's something on the edge of his mind that's bothering him, a nagging, uncomfortable feeling that their time is running out.

But Marian's eyes sparkle in the desert sun, unconcerned. 

"I will never leave you," she promises him with a smile, and when he wakes up her voice still rings in his ears, turning the vow into a sinister threat that chokes him.

End.


End file.
